History shows that not impeaching Donald Trump for his crimes will open the door to even worse Republican behavior in the future. For the sake of the country, we cannot allow that to happen.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today that she is not inclined to impeach President Donald J. Trump. Responding to an observation from a Washington Post reporter that calls for Trump’s impeachment are growing, she responded:

I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.

I don’t lightly contradict one of the most able and storied politicians of my lifetime. But I have spent that lifetime observing, and living with, the consequences of Democratic failure to hold Republicans responsible for their crimes.

Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. At the time, he said it was to appeal to a sense of national unity — kind of the same thing Pelosi is saying here. He even testified to that before Congress. But years later, he confessed to the Post’s Bob Woodward that in fact he had pardoned Nixon simply because he and Nixon had been friends. Woodward didn’t see fit to share that fact with the world until Ford had died, which is one reason I have found it very difficult ever since to take him seriously as a journalist. Americans had a right to know why Ford had done what he had done, because had Nixon gone to prison, it is entirely likely that Reagan never would have been elected president and all the executive-branch crime of his era never would have happened.

Democrats decided not to impeach Reagan even though Reagan had ordered arms to be traded to Iranian militants for hostages and had sold those same militants arms, with the proceeds to be used to fund Nicaraguan conservative insurgents even though Congress had strictly forbidden any such spending. The so-called Iran-contra scandal ended with neither Reagan nor then-vice president George H.W. Bush being impeached or charged. And Bush, at the tail end of his single term as president, pardoned most of the Iran-contra offenders.

Bush’s son, George Walker Bush, ordered torture and warrantless domestic wiretapping used as instruments of government policy despite the fact that they violated the Constitution and both international and U.S. law. But Nancy Pelosi, who became House Speaker for the first time after the 2006 midterms, famously declared impeachment “off the table” then. And after Democrats regained control of the executive branch, President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, never sought to hold Bush or his underlings accountable for the war crimes they had committed (or for the damage they had done to the economy, for that matter).

Had that happened, the GOP would have been far less likely to nominate in 2016 a man with a long history of association with organized crime. There are not many bets you can make about history, but I’m pretty sure that one is solid.

Ronald Reagan was elected when I was 20. I’m now on the cusp of 60. And EVER. SINGLE. REPUBLICAN. PRESIDENTin my adult lifetime has committed criminal acts and escaped, primarily because of Democratic concerns about whether the country could handle holding them accountable.

Well, I’ve got a question for Nancy Pelosi and all Democrats who think as she does:

HOW’S THAT WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA, NANCE? Because it SURE isn’t workin’ out for ordinary Americans.

Consider this: In 1998, the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, a popular president who had lied about consensual but adulterous oral sex. House Republicans took it in the teeth in that year’s midterms, but still held control of the House. You know what else happened?

The GOP continued to hold both the House and the Senate until after the 2006 midterms, regained the House in 2010 and regained the Senate in 2014.

The GOP regained the White House (with Supreme Court-engineered theft) in 2000 and with Russian-engineered theft in 2016.

The idea that Democrats would pay a political price for doing the right thing is laughable. The idea that the country couldn’t handle the truth is laughable. The idea that there isn’t a basis for impeaching Donald J. Trump right now, this very second, is laughable.

But let’s say Pelosi wants to act out of an abundance of caution (as opposed to ignoring her constitutional obligation to hold the president accountable). Here’s what she can do:

Accept that Donald Trump already has admitted that he fired FBI director James Comey to interfere with an investigation. That’s obstruction of justice.

Accept that the Trump family has been benefiting since Trump’s first day in office from people staying at Trump properties that should have been placed in a blind trust but never were — a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Accept that Trump has refused to hold his nominees and employees accountable under the law or to act on his constitutional, legal and regulatory obligations — a violation of the Constitution’s take-care clause.

And that’s only a fraction of what’s already out there in the public record. I suspect that investigations by the House Government Oversight Committee, House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence and House Ways & Means Committee, to name just three, also will find grounds for impeachment ranging from obstruction of justice to espionage to tax fraud.

Pelosi needs to understand that there already is a compelling case for impeaching Donald Trump right this minute and that that case is going to grow stronger, not weaker, with time.

She needs to understand that for all of her accomplishments, history is going to judge her on her response to this question and this question alone.

And she needs to do the right thing for the country: Impeach Donald Trump. Maybe not now, but soon, and well before the 2020 election. Trump is the Framers’ worst nightmare, and Congress should respond to that fact accordingly.